Managing public key infrastructure based security framework in mobile ad hoc networks with distributed protocols

Abstract

Researches in wireless networks in particular Mobile Ad hoc NETworks MANETs have been widely investigated for emergency communication in military operations and disaster management Ensuring an efficient security mechanism for node to node communication in such an infrastructure less network is quite a challenging task The dynamic and ad hoc nodes registered in the MANET require a scalable and robust security management system with the provision for authentication confidentiality integrity and non repudiation These requirements induced Public Key Infrastructure PKI as a suitable solution for secured group communication In a PKI based MANET security system the public keys or asymmetric cryptographic key pairs are bound with respective identities of nodes The binding is achieved through the registration and distribution of certificates issued by a trusted Certificate Authority CA Certification is mandatory to authenticate the genuine nodes for node to node communication Another prominent feature of the PKI based security system is certificate key management by which the credibility certificates or keys are ensured for a secured group communication Hence accomplishing the PKI system promises newlinesecured and high functionality all of which is critically important for the development of mobile ad hoc networks In contrast to other wireless network PKI with a centralized CA is not realizable in MANET and exhibits several challenges due to the distinctive node characteristics Indeed the role of CA should be distributed among the mobile nodes to form the key infrastructure Therefore managing the newlinecertificates as well as the key pairs in PKI MANET system should neither depend nor trust on any fixed CA rather should be self organized and distributed among the many number of nodes divided into groups called clusters Moreover in such a distributed network each node in the cluster provides its contributory shares for certificate and key management which eliminates single vi point of failure dependency newline newline